Item
Bibliographic Resource
Lynching Victim Is Cleared of Rape, 100 Years Later
- Title of the Document
- Lynching Victim Is Cleared of Rape, 100 Years Later
- One Line Summary
- New York Times article discusses the 2000 exonaration of a young African American man in the early 1900s, who was lynched after being falsely and unfairly accused and convicted by an all white jury of raping a Caucasian woman in Chattanooga.
- Author
- Emily Yellin
- Date Created
- 27 February 2000
- Location
- Chattanooga, Tennessee
- Type of Document
- Newspaper Article
- Publisher
- The New York Times
- Transcription
-
"In 1906, the lynching of a young black man named Ed Johnson was a public spectacle in the heart of this Smoky Mountain city. Just before he was hanged, he said to the crowd of white men, women and children who were watching: ''God bless you all. I am innocent.''
On Friday, almost 100 years later, in a downtown courtroom here packed with a somber crowd of black and white men, women and children, and with television news cameras recording every moment, Mr. Johnson was vindicated.
Judge Douglas A. Meyers set aside Mr. Johnson's conviction of raping a white woman, saying: ''Something I don't believe the white community really understands is that, especially at that time, the object was to bring in a black body, not necessarily the person who had committed the crime. And I think that's what happened in this case. There was a rush to find somebody to convict and blame for this.''
Mr. Johnson's conviction was highly suspect. The all-white jury in the trial never heard the victim definitively identify her attacker. In addition, a member of the jury physically threatened Mr. Johnson and was not admonished by the judge.
After the guilty verdict, Mr. Johnson was sentenced to death. But the United States Supreme Court agreed at the time to hear an appeal of the case on the grounds that Mr. Johnson's right to a fair trial had been violated. The court issued a stay of his execution. That ruling, seen as unwanted federal interference, did not sit well with whites in Chattanooga.
So on the night after the Supreme Court stay of execution, a mob of white men broke into the jail, took Mr. Johnson from his cell, paraded him through the streets and dragged him to a downtown bridge that spanned the Tennessee River. With a hangman's noose dangling from a metal girder above the Walnut Street Bridge, they hoisted Mr. Johnson up by his neck.
As he was swinging in the air, a few men began to riddle Mr. Johnson's body with rounds and rounds of bullets. A stray bullet severed the rope, and Mr. Johnson's body fell onto the bridge. Then, one of the men put the barrel of his gun to Mr. Johnson's head and fired five times.
The Supreme Court responded to the town's defiance of its authority by holding a criminal trial of the Chattanooga sheriff at the time, Joseph F. Shipp, along with a number of other local law-enforcement officers and members of the group who had participated in the lynching.
It was the first and only time the Supreme Court has held a criminal trial. The court found the sheriff and some of the other defendants guilty of contempt of court for violating the court order that Mr. Johnson was to be kept safe, and thereby aiding and abetting his lynching." - Provenance
- Yellin, Emily. 2000. “Lynching Victim Is Cleared of Rape, 100 Years Later.” The New York Times, February 27, 2000. https://www.nytimes.com/2000/02/27/us/lynching-victim-is-cleared-of-rape-100-years-later.html?unlocked_article_code=1.KU4.9iD0.IG6BGdVoG5hP&smid=url-share.